Category Archives: novel plans

“Canto” is what I idiotically call a chapter in my hometown novels. Writing a chapter in a novel is a much more complex and difficult thing than you might realize. I just finished rewriting Canto 23 of the novel I am working on for the third time. I will share that chapter here as an example of what I am blathering on about.

Canto Twenty-Three : Scaling the Wall of the Werewolf House

“So, you figured out how to get across the gap between the branch and the window?” I asked Milt.

“Of course. Look up there at the peak of the roof directly above the window.”

“What exactly am I looking at?” I asked.

“Don’t you see that knob thing on the top corner?”

Straining my eyes, I did see a tiny silver ball thing on the centerboard of the roof, right at the very peak of the corner. It looked microscopic from the ground.

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, that’s the answer,” said Brent, pulling a coil of rope out of his backpack.I swallowed hard.

“You mean…”

“Yeah. I’m gonna throw the rope over the knob thing and then you can swing in through the window like Tarzan.”

“Naw. If you don’t die swinging in first, we’ll all do it.” Brent grinned with the confidence of somebody who never experienced accidents the way the rest of us had at one time or another.

“Why do I have to do it first?” I complained.

“Because Andrew decided not to come. We always make Andrew do the life and death stuff first. But he’s still mad about the dilly-whacking party going bad, and nobody being willing to go to it.” Milt was grinning that lop-sided grin of his, like a Cheshire cat, only more snarky.

“So if I die, you will tell my folks how it happened?”

“Of course,” said Brent. “We’ll make sure they know the whole thing was entirely your idea.”

“And we’ll say you forced us to do it,” added Milt.

I looked up at the tree. Branches for hand-holds were not too far apart. I had climbed worse trees before that particular tree. Then I looked at Milt. He was nodding “Yes” and grinning.

I looked back at the tree and swallowed hard again. Then I looked at Brent. His grin was even more fake than Milt’s.

I looked over at Superchicken, probably the most sensible member of the Pirates. He looked kinda grim and just shrugged at me.

I figured the time had come to decide. I started to walk away from the base of the tree.

“Whoa, there, buddy,” said Brent, grabbing me from behind and turning me around to face the tree again. He gave me a push towards the tree.

Gingerly I tested each branch before I used it to pull myself upwards. And then I got a foothold on the lowest branches. As I climbed higher, Milt started up right behind me.

“Keep going, Todd,” Milt said. “You can’t just stop climbing. You stop climbing while I keep going, you end up sitting on my head.”

I looked down at him and frowned. He grinned up at me. When he was on the third branch up, Brent began climbing after us. Superchicken brought up the rear guard. If I didn’t keep going, Superchick might end up with three guys sitting on his head.

Then I got up high enough to be on the branch that was about even with what we believed was Torrie’s window. Ooh, did that look narrow out towards the end! But I bucked up the old courage and slid out towards the little end.

“Guys, this branch is bending down!”

“Be brave. We’ll tell your parents you died heroically if you fall.”

“Um, yeah.”

So I ended up sitting on the narrow end of the branch, sagging down about two feet below the bottom of the window. There was about four feet of empty space between where I sat and the window.

“Now what?” I complained.

“Now the rope!” said Brent. He tossed it outwards and upwards, the coil carrying it up over the knob on the roof peak just as slick and as cool as Roy Rogers ever did during one of those singing cowboy shows. The rope uncoiled back down until it dangled in front of me, just out of reach.

“So, how do I get a hold of that?” I complained again.

“Lean out and grab it,” Brent said, like that was nothing. Like that was the easiest thing in the world.

“Yeah right.” I leaned out as far as I could. I could just barely touch it with the tips of my fingers. I tried twiddling my fingers to get hold of it, That just made it wiggle and dance out of reach.

“Lean out further,” Brent said.

“Easy for you to say.”

I leaned out an inch too far. And suddenly I was airborne. My feet were hanging over nothing. My heart was trying to escape by coming up out of my throat and bursting across into the side of the house. Or maybe that was my stomach. My flailing hands snagged the rope. I bashed into the side of the house with a loud thump, but I had saved myself from falling to my death like the Andrew stick figure in Milt’s diagram.

“Hang on!” said Milt and Brent together in hoarse voices.

“You hang on!” I said to Brent. He was anchoring the rope with both hands and his legs were wrapped firmly around the branch.Just then, the window went open and the baby werewolf was looking out at me with a scared expression that was probably at least the equal to the one on my face.

“Wha-what are you doing there?” Torrie stammered.

“We came to visit you,” I said, breathlessly.

“Oh, wow!” Torrie seemed to catch his breath. Then he caught hold of the rope and helped Brent pull me up to the window sill. He grabbed me by the seat of my Levis and hauled me into his attic bedroom.

Then, as I sat disheveled on the floor and looked at Torrie, his hairy face blossomed into a huge white-toothed smile.

“I can’t believe it! I mean, I hoped you would come, but I never imagined…”

“Hey, werewolf! Swing the rope back to us so we can come in too,” commanded Brent. Torrie quickly moved to the window to comply, but never for a moment dropped that huge happy smile.

*****

So, there you have it. A single filigreed puzzle piece in stand-alone form. In the previous twenty-two cantos you would’ve learned that Torrie suffered from a genetic disorder called hypertrichosis, the werewolf-hair disease. Because of that genetic anomaly, he was living his life in isolation and imprisonment due to his family’s shameful secrets. Todd, the narrator-character, has vowed to befriend the secretive boy werewolf. He is even willing to climb a tree to get to Torrie. It kinda helps to know that stuff before you try to read and understand this canto. But a canto has to have its own beginning, middle, and end. There needs to be rising action, a climax, and a conclusion. And yet, it has to link to the cantos both before and after. And in a comic fantasy novel like this one, it helps if there are also funny bits. You can see, then, why this canto was a struggle for me. But I think now the hurdle is finally crossed. So, on with the story!

Sometimes going forward will set you too far back. Sometimes the only direction you can take is down and out. I am not at that point yet. But it is now on the horizon.

Am I sounding suicidal? I hope not. I was glooming about publishing and books that I am trying to make live. I have paid Page Publishing practically all the payments I stupidly agreed to, and yet, I am stuck in an endless loop of editing where they ignore my emails and appear to be proceeding without me. The clueless case manager sends me an email saying, “Go ahead, take all the time you need to edit” after I have already emailed them the final instructions and requested the process continue to the next step. I re-sent that email and asked them if they have gotten my last email. No responses, though. What the hell am I paying them money for? I’m editing the book myself. Their proof-reader makes changes that I have to change back to the original, and then they don’t even want to take the next step?

I admit that my illustrations for this rant are only pictures saved for other posts that never got used before. Like this cool Kingdom Hearts one;

But I am not ready to kill the project yet and hire a lawyer to sue the publisher to get my money back. I want to see this book, Magical Miss Morgan, live.

And I need to see Snow Babies live too.

But from here on we go with the cheapest possible options. Free if possible.

Here is another Wizard Donald to look at while I continue to stew about publishing problems;

I have always tried to make the best of what I already have. I have always lived by the idea that other people are all my equals, even the really stupid ones, and I have nothing that I am not obliged to share.

I have little left besides wit and wisdom. And I have tried hard to share that here. But I sometimes feel like I am alone and pointless.

But the captain always goes down with his ship. And if my ship is sinking, then at least I will soon know if there are mermaids down there willing to teach me to breathe underwater, or possibly not.

As both an artist and a writer I portray people I have known. I can also say that I have portrayed people I love, but that is rather redundantly repetitive because I basically love all people, even the really nasty ones who hate me in return. It’s a teacher thing. But portraits as a writer/artist/cartoonist/fool is not a straightforward thing. Let me start by unpacking my portraits of the Cobble Sisters. Sherry and Shelly Cobble are twin sisters. They are in several of my YA novels about the little town in rural Iowa where I grew up.

They are nudists. That means their family believes there are health benefits to not wearing any clothes when they are at home or spending private time with the rest of their family and friends. I can claim that they are based on real people, because they are, but that takes considerable explaining.

Sherry Cobble

I have a pair of identical twin cousins who I grew up with and learned about the unique things twin share from them. But the Cobble Sisters are not a direct portrait of them. They are not nudists. And they would probably beat me to a pulp if I dared to insist that they were.

The nudist/naturists I once knew and lived near were in Iowa City where I went to grad school (and where I found the original model for the picture), and in Austin, Texas where my girlfriend’s sister was living in a clothing-optional apartment complex. My parents lived in an Austin suburb and when my girlfriend and I visited the area in the 80’s, I stayed at my parents’ home and she stayed at the crazy communal resort for naked people where her sister lived. This situation provided the background for the embarrassment humor in my novel Superchicken. That’s the story that includes an episode where the main character is tricked into going to a nudist camp as a guest with the Cobble family. Poor Superchicken didn’t realize until he got there that it was a place where you have to take off all your clothes to blend in.

Which leads quite naturally into the second portrait I want to talk about. Edward-Andrew Campbell is called “the Superchicken” by his friends in Norwall, Iowa. That nickname is actually my nickname from high school. It comes from part of the George of the Jungle Saturday morning cartoon show by Jay Ward (Rocky and Bullwinkle’s creator).

The nickname was hung on me by a girl I had a huge crush on from grade school through junior high. Superchicken in the cartoon show was this mild-mannered chicken who could gain super powers by drinking super sauce and then fight crime. She obviously thought I was full of hidden talents just like him.

So Superchicken is a me character.

But the picture is not me drawing myself as a boy. It is modeled on my young second cousin who was my little buddy for the last two years of high school and during my first couple of years in college. The portrait in the novel, however, is part me and part a student from my early years as a teacher. The Anita Jones portrait is drawn from a Sears catalog model, while the real girl was the most popular girl in my grade at school, I wasn’t the only boy hopelessly in love with her.

Finally, since I am well over the word-count target already, I want to talk about the portrait of the main character in my novel about to be published, Miss Francis Morgan.

On the left you see who Francis really was. Mother Mendocino was born to be a teacher, and it is her natural-born love of teaching and rapport with kids that I am portraying in the novel. In the novel, though, everything that happens in that classroom was really something that happened in my classroom, not hers. Especially the invasion of the classroom by three-inch tall fairies. But it should also be obvious that Miss Morgan is not a portrait of me. I am not female. I could never respond to and touch kids the way she does because our society frowns on that from male teachers. And further, she is not Hispanic because the novel is set in 1990’s Iowa rather than the deep South Texas town where these things happened. So I based the drawing on another teacher I knew from Iowa, one that had always been the next door neighbor girl when I was a kid. She babysat me and was older than me.

So, my portrait art that I am mangling the discussion of in this post is made up mostly of amalgamated portraits. A little of this person added to a lot of that one, with a sprinkle of me mixed in for goof-factor effect. The novel Magical Miss Morgan is being edited by Page Publishing as I write this and will be available soon. I am hoping that a few of you may be foolish enough to buy one and read it. I truly believe in my goofy old heart that you will like it.

I have so many ideas for posts that I have to pause for a minute and sort through them so I don’t get so busy writing I forget something that is a very good idea. So, I intend to write today about things I am planning to post.

Sunday I wrote part one of “Why Do You Think That?” It was specifically about the insane notion that “All kids are good kids”. The kind of thing only a weird old retired teacher could believe. There needs to be at least a part two. I have some other weird beliefs to defend. “Even we atheists need religion” is one. “Everybody is a nudist under their clothes” is another. “Conservatives and Liberals are different animals” is another that might get me killed.

I wrote a blog post before about accepting entries in an inter-stellar bad-poetry-writing contest. I have an insane urge to put some of my own ridiculously bad and morally indefensible poetry in that contest. There is enough of that to seriously challenge for the worst poet in the galaxy title.

I have also been doing some colored-pencil artwork that I want to talk about the process of the making of it and show you the work in stages of progress. That is a way a blogger can make more out of nothing.

Trump is trying hard to take over my blog with clownish buffoonery, but, of course, I am trying to get away from doing that all the time. The Great Orange Face is certainly an easy mark for something to make fun of. But I can’t keep up with other political humorists. I am too dedicated to avoiding insult humor to deal with a clown that invites you so enticingly to throw pies at his face. He does it so often, and I have already thrown so many pies… that my arms are about to fall off.

After a particularly bad night of vomiting and breathing problems, I am once again thinking about writing about death and the extinction of the whole human race. Playing checkers with the Grim Reaper is an unusual source for humorous blogs, but I have enough inside information and first hand experience to turn it into a wild board game played on a roller coaster at midnight.

Yes, I am randomly re-visiting illustrations from my picture file.

I am currently writing a comedy horror novel called The Baby Werewolf. It is a story I have been working on for twenty years. It challenges my very skills as a surrealist. There should be plenty of things to complain about in this blog along the way. I know you probably aren’t interested in that. But I am. And don’t tell anybody this, but I don’t write this blog for you, the reader. I write it for me. It makes me laugh and it makes me cry and it gives form and permanence to the never-ending dialogue going on in my head.

So, as I approach the 500 word mark, this blog stands revealed as a writer’s road map. If you are one of those readers who actually reads the whole blog and don’t just click “like” after looking at the pictures, then you know what sorts of things to avoid in the future with this goofy old blog thing.

On a quiet back street in Toonerville there is a haunted house. Obviously four meddling kids and their talking dog are looking around inside, but they won’t find anything. It is my dark place. I am the only one that can go inside and discover what truly is there, for the dark things inside are all a part of the dark side of Mickey.

But Mickey doesn’t have a dark side, you try and argue. Micky is all goofy giggles and nerdy Dungeons and Dragons jokes. Mickey is all cartoons and silly stories and he makes us all guffaw.

But I can assure you, everyone has a dark side. Without darkness, how can anyone recognize the light?

So, I have to go inside the old Ghost House every now and then and take stock of all the furniture, and make note of everyone… and every thing that has been living there. I go in there now because I am starting to rewrite a very dark story that I really have to get down on paper in novel form. It isn’t a true story. Ghost stories never are. But it is full of true things… old hurts, old fears, panics, and ghosts of Christmases Past.

There was the night I was stalked by a large black dog when I was nine and walking home from choir practice at the Methodist Church. We are talking Hound of the Baskervilles sort of big damn dog. I knew every dog that lived in town in those days, but I didn’t know that one. Maybe it wasn’t actually hunting me, but I ran the last two blocks to my house that night faster than I ever knew I could run before.

There was that cool autumn afternoon when he grabbed me and pushed me down behind a pile of tractor tires in the neighbor’s yard. He forcibly got my pants down… and what he did to me… It has taken more than forty years to be able to talk about what happened. I wasn’t able to talk about it until after I learned that he had died.

There were the nights spent in the emergency room. Severe potassium depletion… chest pains that could’ve been heart trouble but weren’t… The morning when my blood pressure was so high I thought I was going to die in front of my second period seventh grade English class. And the terrible waits in the emergency room when someone I loved was serious about suicide… that was the most terrible of all.

I am not frightened by the grim reaper in the same way that Shaggy and Scooby are. I have spent time in his company too many times for that. I do not fear him. In some ways he brings welcome relief. And I do believe I can beat him in chess and at least tie him in checkers.

So, yeah, the dark resources are all still there… still in place at the bottom of a deep, dark well. Bad things do wait in the future… but they are in the present and the past also. I am not a slave to fear and evil has no power over me. So, I think I can safely write a horror story. And I admit I am not Steven King. But I don’t want to be him. I want to be Mickey. And that is certainly scary enough for me.

I just finished a novel project last Thursday, completing the manuscript of Recipes for Gingerbread Children. But being the excessively creative goofball that I am, this was not a stand-alone project. The companion book, The Baby Werewolf, is an incomplete manuscript of a comedy horror story about a boy with hypertrichosis, sometimes known as werewolf-hair disease. Both books happen in the same period of time in 1974 and share both characters and events. The boy, Torrie Brownfield, has lost his mother. His father has brought him back to a small Iowa town where he himself was once a boy, to live in the same house where the boy’s father and uncle grew up. The uncle, hiding some dark secrets of his own, requires that Torrie be raised in hiding up in the attic. But this only lasts until a local farm boy, Todd Niland, discovers Torrie’s sad existence and becomes his friend. This is a much darker story than I have tackled before, and I am no stranger to dark humor. It is significant, though, that both Todd and Torrie are gingerbread children from the book I just finished, and even though some sad, dark things come to light in that book, they are not nearly as sad and dark as what is present in this next project. So I had to find some inspiration before trying to re-ignite the novel forge for The Baby Werewolf.

That led me to watch the video Donnie Darko for the very first time.

Oofah! What a strange, horrible, yet beautiful movie! Richard Kelly’s first film is an incredible artwork that makes your soul sing darkly. Talk about listening to dark rabbits from the future… really, I mean, no one told anyone they should talk about about dark rabbits from the future… but this film does with a twisted elegance and ironically terrible beauty. It discusses the sex lives of Smurfs, raises alarms with old women wandering aimlessly to the mailbox in the path of oncoming cars, and fires teachers from their jobs for discussing the short stories of Graham Greene. There is no way I can explain in a witless-wordless movie review. You must simply watch the movie for yourself.

Remember this musical masterpiece? “Hello, Darkness, my old friend… I’ve come to talk with you again…” Yes, I am entertaining the darkness again because I will be depending on her to help me write this book whose theme is going to be, “Everyone dies in the end, but the real life depends on how we deal with that fact.”

Yes, people who know me, I mean really know me, including the facts behind what I can’t actually say in this blog because the innocent must be protected, will probably worry that I am undertaking a writing project about monsters and depression and suicidal thoughts and child abuse. I do have scars. But I am at peace with the hard parts of the life behind me. And from great pain and profound suffering, beautiful things can be made. So don’t worry. Downloading a bunch of monster-movie darkness into my stupid old head is not going to hurt me at this point in my life. And if I can’t write it now, it will never be written.

If you are one of those readers who has taken to regularly reading Mickey posts on Catch a Falling Star ( a habit that is probably bad for you, but certainly not fatal), there are some things and random recent developments that you should probably be made aware of.

Mickey recently finished a rough-draft novel. After giving birth to a massive 12-month-long-gestating thought artifact like that, there is bound to be some necessary recovery time involved. He may be difficult to understand for a while as he puts the pieces of his psyche back together again. Using mental duct tape for such things takes time and patience.

The novel is called Recipes for Gingerbread Children. If that arouses curiosity in you (a condition that I also hope is not fatal… You are not a cat, are you?), there are instances of rants and delusional spoutings about this story to be found in recent posts on this blog. Unfortunately, it will not be published immediately. You will have to wait to actually read it until I or my heirs eventually get it published… by whatever means necessary (though I have my doubts about the plan involving kidnapped alien slaves and mimeograph machines.)

The novel I do have nearing publication is Magical Miss Morgan. I recently submitted approval for final edits to my project manager for Page Publishing. Since I am investing my own money in this publication project, I am expecting that it will get published before 2017 is done. I will continue to relentlessly plug the thing here.

Page Publishing is a less expensive and less professional publisher than I-Universe that did Catch a Falling Star for me. If you are reading this for ideas about pursuing publication yourself, I would recommend the more expensive publisher first, due to the quality of their professional editors, though I intend to continue publishing my books with less expensive self-publishing options like Amazon from here on. As I finish the publishing process I am now involved in, I promise to complain about publishers and throw Mark-Twain-like insult fits in future blog posts. No one should have to repeat the egregious mistakes that Mickey has made.

Catch a Falling Star, the blog, will continue to be a blog about my artwork, my story-telling, my teacher memories, and my generally confusing and bombastic opinions about life, the universe, and everything… including pies. Mmm! Pies are good. You might even want to look at my essay on Gooseberry Pie.

In case you were not aware of it, this purple mouse-man is Mickey, and Mickey is the writer-spirit within me. Mickey is not actually me. You know how Mark Twain is not really a real person? The real person was Samuel Langhorn Clemens. Mickey is not a really real person either. Michael Beyer, cartoonist, writer, and former middle school teacher is the real person… if any former middle school teacher can ever be considered a real person.